Acer Aspire desktop and Mint?

[PiMinto]

I have an Acer Aspire desktop currently with only Vista on it, and I'd like to put Mint on for a dual boot. I've looked at the partitions, and sda1 is a 7gb Acer diagnostic partition. If I install grub there am I gonna brick it? Vista is on sda2, and that drive is marked as boot - should grub go there?

[xenopeek]

You have two options for installing GRUB; either to /dev/sda (no number), which would put GRUB on the MBR of your hard disk. This puts GRUB in control of the dual booting, so it will show a menu at boot to choose which operating system to load. Or you can install GRUB to the partition on which you install Linux Mint. You would then have to install another boot manager to your MBR from Windows, like EasyBCD, so that this program gives you a way to choose which operating system to boot.

[PiMinto]

I've done the easybcd thing before but I prefer grub. I tried installing Mint 13 twice but it crashed both times in the same place, just after choosing language. I tried 12 and that went on fine. I unfortunately don't have the resources to download 14 at the moment, though I'd really like to! Grub is working fine